Heads up! OpenBSD-sgi does now support Fuel, Octane and Origin 200

Miod Vallat (miod@) announced some days ago on the sgi@ mailing list that the OpenBSD Operating System does now run on SGI / Silicon Graphics Fuel, Octane and Origin 200.

Owners of this kind of exotic hardware may want to give it a try.

Here is Miod's message:

From: Miod Vallat 
To: sgi@openbsd.org
Subject: Fuel, Octane and Origin 200 support
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 01:38:59 +0000

Hello folks,

  I am glad to announce that we have reached a state where support for
Fuel, Octane and Origin machines is worth testing. There are still
known problems, which are being worked on, but these machines are
however usable if you run the latest OpenBSD/sgi snapshot (binaries from
May 31th).

  What works:

- Fuel, Octane and Origin 200 boot multiuser.
- On-board SCSI controllers are supported.
- On-board USB controller on Fuel is supported.
- PCI devices in Fuel and Origin 200 are expected to work. I use fxp(4)
  network cards in both Fuel and Origin 200, and will try more devices
  soonish. Some cards will not configure correctly because of
  limitations in my code, which I am working on.
- For the Octane owners with PCI card cages, these should be supported
  as well as the Fuel and Origin 200 PCI slots, but this has not been
  tested.

  What doesn't work:

- The onboard Ethernet interface on theses machines is not supported yet
  (which is why I am using fxp PCI network cards). This means that the
  Octane systems without PCI card cages are pretty useless at the
  moment.
- Neither the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports nor the graphics options
  are supported yet; serial console is required at the moment.
- On multiprocessor machines, only one processor will be used at the
  moment.

  What might work:

- Other systems of similar designs will probably work to some extent,
  but we won't know this until someone having access to these systems
  tests OpenBSD on them and reports how it went. Such systems are:
  Origin 2000, Onyx 2, Origin/Onyx 300, Origin/Onyx 3000. If your system
  has multiple nodes, only the resources of the first node will be used.

  What will not work:

- The Origin/Onyx 350, Onyx 4 and Tezro could run, but there is no
  support for their PCI-X controller yet (which means no devices will
  be detected on them, not even the onboard devices). This will not
  change until a developer can get access to such a machine.

Enjoy!
Miod

PS: I should thank Jean-Marc Harang for lending me a Fuel system to work
on; this has helped immensely.

Beside, there is some SGI hardware on want.html that is needed to further developments:

• a SGI Fuel or Origin (or Onyx) 300 and either an Origin (or Onyx) 350 or a Tezro (preferrably the rackmount version) needed in France (contact miod@);
• a SGI O2 workstation, preferably with a 300MHz or faster CPU, needed in London, England (contact oga@);
• a PCI cardcage for SGI Octane needed in Gorinchem, the Netherlands (contact jasper@).